Like I said in one of the previous posts, some of the PC TV tuners still use notch filters to seperate luminance and chrominance ! For HDTV, it would seem to almost be advantagous for them to include poor analog broadcast circuitry. If the customers get very dissapointed whenever they have to tune to an analog channel, it only hastens the transition to 100% digital. Not that I'm opposed to that. Like you said, MPEG-2 might not be perfect, but I think it's pretty good, especially for a 10-20 Mbps stream. Consider that raw NTSC is like 166 Mbps, and raw HDTV (without MPEG-2) would be in the Gbps range.
I'm an EE, and I'm still afraid of some of the analog video circuits!
Perhaps not trimpots, but hsync PLL's with analog timebase correction, glass delay-line analog comb filters, and the like certainly scare me. For me (and most of the coming generation of EE's), it's more likely that we've been taught about various digital algorithms, VHDL, DSP, sampling, etc, than it is that we've had rigorous/advanced analog design courses. We get a couple basic circuit analayis and transistor analysis courses, sure, but that wouldn't be nearly enough to prepare us to process any *useful* signal using analog devices. So the trend might continue to move away from analog processing (in our generation). Either that, or the few who are well-trained with analog processing will get very nice paychecks.
Sean